Music industry spokesman loves child porn

A music-industry speaker at an American Chamber of Commerce event in Stockholm waxed enthusiastic about child porn, because it serves as the perfect excuse for network censorship, and once you've got a child-porn filter, you can censor anything:

"Child pornography is great," the speaker at the podium declared enthusiastically. "It is great because politicians understand child pornography. By playing that card, we can get them to act, and start blocking sites. And once they have done that, we can get them to start blocking file sharing sites".

The venue was a seminar organized by the American Chamber of Commerce in Stockholm on May 27, 2007, under the title "Sweden -- A Safe Haven for Pirates?". The speaker was Johan Schlüter from the Danish Anti-Piracy Group, a lobby organization for the music and film industry associations, like IFPI and others...

"One day we will have a giant filter that we develop in close cooperation with IFPI and MPA. We continuously monitor the child porn on the net, to show the politicians that filtering works. Child porn is an issue they understand," Johan Schlüter said with a grin, his whole being radiating pride and enthusiasm from the podium.

A) What he is saying is far worse than the sensational headline you attached to the item.

B)I don’t understand why all of guys sound so surprised?
He just expressed out loud the social structure that has being going on for a long time…

Today the terms “pedophile” and “terrorist” are used as a goverment controlling tool where everyone suddenly shut up and let the goverment (all western goverments) do what ever it wants in realizaion of how horrible those things are.
Moral panic, opression by the majority, hatred and pressecution are engraved in American tradition.
Before that, there were “communist” and “homosexual”, horrible creatures that need to be exterminated!
Before that there were the witches and the jews.
In other places it were heretics, and so on…

This speaker is not evil. He simply uses the tools that were given to him by YOU!
He is not breaking any law and he doen’t do anything which is not allowed.
He is not more evil than the clerc at the IRS which comes down on you as hard as he is permitted.

P.S If I’m not mistaken the whole legal issue with cannabis was fueled by hatred to mexicans.

Someone find us this audio make a catchy dance remix, with facts about the music industry as text on the youtube screen. Let’s show them what fair use can do, and let’s meme this motherfucker out of a job.

Hey dear boing boing moderators, this is one of many times my comment on a topic is deleted even if I am not writing anything bad or trolling, have you problems with your comments system? I am a serious man, and medical doctor.

Since you obviously don’t read responses to your comments, I’ll put the answer in your comment. In bold. The system holds comments with more than one URL from the same domain. But if you would be happier feeling oppressed by THE MAN, don’t let me stop you.

Coming from an industry lobby, it is a great way of saying that they don’t understand anything about it. IT is one of those keywords that shut down both of their brain cells and makes them do even more stupid things than usually.

CP is like the terrorism card. You play it and it makes the politicians and policy makers do the terrorists’ (or child pornographers’) jobs for them – along with incredible amounts of collateral damage.
With terrorism, it results in scaremongering and terror and slowly running down the society. With child pornographers, it involves hiding CP and not taking any real action (which is what they want too) while blocking mostly legitimate content and creating a process and precedent of “guilty unless proven otherwise and we don’t tell you about it”.

Well that sounds horribly evil. I knew industry wonks were ham-fisted, ignorant brutes, but I didn’t really expect this whole “I am smiling at the thought of monitoring and controlling millions of people via their computers” Disney-level villainy.

Bragging about your evil scheme to rule the world (while smiling about it) is bad enough, but to give your opposition ammunition by smiling while saying “child pornography is great” into an open microphone is, like, Austin Powers level comedic villainy. I have to at least entertain the notion that Johan SchlÃ¼ter might be some character being played by a Sascha Baron Cohen wannabe.

“Child porn = file sharing” is like saying “poison = cooking”, he is using an abhorrent anomaly as justification for quashing a valuable tool. Plus he is basically admitting to using scare tactics to get his way.

If the leaders of 15th century Europe decided that printing of books was bad because they found some people printing pornography, and so decided to ban all books. . . well. . .

This is exactly what I can see happening to us here in Australia once the gov imposes the clean feed filter. Once they have the infrastructure in place to block child porn, music industry pressures pols to start blocking piracy sites. Then who knows what else! BoingBoing>?
What a bright wonderful future were headed for!

Tor is a sucky solution, this the last measure you can take to proect your freedom.
It slows your internet down considerably and it only helps in net surfing.
The greater problem are laws that mminimze your civil rights in all aspects. Like this outrageos demand to show your computers content when crossing the border and alowing the guards to make copis of it. Secret business documents, private photos, and whatever- all for others to see.
And this is just one example.

What this story tells us is that Johan SchlÃ¼ter is so confident in his ability to bamboozle (or buy) legislators that he doesn’t worry about tipping his hand. Let’s hope he’s an incompetent Disney villain who has said too much, and not just … right.

I don’t think he is saying child pornography is great. I think he is saying the phrase “child pornography” is great because everyone knows how horrible it is (even politicians). He is using it as a way to stop file sharing sites from enabling people to steal software, music and movies. Yes, stealing!!!! and yes, enabling stealing!!!

I almost submitted this link, but since it was from a blog instead of a main stream media site and because my track record for submissions hasn’t been very good lately I decided against it. I’m really glad it made it to Boing Boing though, people need to see this.

Saddest thing is, because of this, the child pornographers have become the cutting-edge of privacy advocacy.

The internet was founded on military research, but development and growth was driven and funded mostly by (regular, vanilla) porn. The majority of traffic for a long time (even now? Not sure, haven’t seen any stats lately) was porn. Porn was cutting edge, and drove the development of online payment systems, p2p filesharing, and suchlike.

After porn, there was piracy. Piracy (and gaming, to an extent) drove the uptake of broadband, and further development of P2P.

Currently, systems like Freenet and TOR owe a lot of their popularity (and traffic, and bandwidth, and development) to child porn. It will, I’m pretty sure, result in us finally getting a system for end-to-end anonymous payments (BitCoin is one way to go, but there are other proposals, too), and getting a solid infrastructure for fast anonymous P2P file sharing, and a good system of web browsing that’s not snoopable by your government.

I’m *really hoping* that more reasonable stuff will be pushed underground by the MPAA/RIAA and other pro-ACTA lobbyists, so we won’t have to hail child pornographers as saviours of the internet. I’d much prefer to treat pirates as heroes, instead.

Actually, nowadays it’s just around 2% of the internet being porn (according to 8 out of 10 cats. British comedians: the most trusted name in porn statistics) if measured by memory. That’s still a substantial amount, though.

Is this actually something that you can say without it ruining your career? Publicly announcing that you are glad that child pornography exists so you can use it to push through (easily-bypassed, as the link helpfully points out) ‘net filtering? And actually publicly announcing that you intend to manipulate the government?

Or is he really a double-agent planted by the Pirate Party to undermine the entertainment giants?